Summary
The Afterparty continues to cast suspicion on one guest after another, but the mystery still isn’t coming together like the first season did.
This recap of The Afterparty Season 2 Episode 4 contains spoilers.
The Afterparty follows a very standard and recognisable mystery format, which is simply that every episode ends by casting huge amounts of suspicion on someone else.
Case in point, Episode 3 revealed that Edgar was probably poisoned with a flower named Devil’s Trumpet, which was in the wedding arrangement and grows in the garden outside Hannah’s yurt. Thus, Edgar’s sister is the sudden prime suspect, but her testimony – presented as a Wes Anderson riff that isn’t totally committed to – seemingly exonerates her and hands the baton off to the next suspect.
The Afterparty Season 2 Episode 4 Recap
So, Danner, Aniq, and Zoe head over to confront Hannah, especially Zoe, who is so eager to pin the blame for the murder on someone that it’s almost reading as less sisterly concern and more an active effort to obscure her own involvement. But let’s not dwell.
According to Hannah’s version of events, she and Edgar had a close relationship. They bonded over obscure hobbies in childhood and then, as they got older and Edgar got busier, they remained close if not necessarily as co-dependent. There isn’t a secretive childhood resentment that’d justify Hannah bumping him off.
Why did Hannah want to disrupt the wedding?
There is a bombshell revelation, though, which is that Hannah was in love with Grace and that the two of them, after meeting and bonding over antiques and France, engaged in a torrid month-long affair.
As far as I can tell, nobody outside of Hannah and Grace themselves knew about this. So, when Grace broke the relationship off on the cusp of the wedding, Hannah had nobody to turn to. She had to deal with her feelings alone, realized that she couldn’t stand by and witness Grace marry someone else, even her brother, and tries to convince Grace that they should be together instead.
This retelling obviously folds in other characters and plot elements – the typewriter with the missing “G”, Sebastian, who seems to be everywhere, Uncle Ulysses, who steals every scene he’s in but isn’t in nearly enough, and so on, and so forth – but it’s mostly a simple affair. When Grace is adamant about marrying Edgar, Hannah must take a rasher approach.
Why does Hannah decide to leave?
This one involves Travis, who as we learned last week also intended to disrupt the wedding. But this also fails because Hannah is the only person privy to what Edgar says to Grace in the vow box. While to most it would seem like a slot machine trying to ring cherries, Hannah, who has known Edgar since childhood, recognizes his eccentric biometric accounting as a real, earnest confession of love. And since the love is real, she can’t interfere in it.
She continues, though, to love Grace herself, so she chooses instead to sequester herself on a year-long ocean passage. Her gifting Edgar the typewriter key – his reaction to this, totally oblivious to the idea of sentimentality, is very funny – is a farewell.
Of course, though, Edgar dies, which means, in a bleak sense, that Grace is now single, giving Hannah a new motive to linger around and be a shoulder to cry on. Probably best not to put too much thought into that.
The Afterparty Season 2 Episode 4 Ending Explained
There are other matters to attend to anyway, most obviously of which, Sebastian. This dude was everywhere all throughout Hannah’s story, and his presence in its closing moments gives Aniq a lightbulb a-ha moment, which turns out to be that Edgar had fired Sebastian and had a shortlist of potential replacements. However, Sebastian has basically just ignored this and carried on working for the company, presumably for his personal gain before he’s cast out.
The episode ends with Sebastian making a business call – he made one earlier in the episode to a Korean and had Feng do the talking, clearly as an excuse to give Ken Jeong something to do – and pretending to be Edgar.
At this point, it’s hard to say if Edgar losing his job was a motive for murder, but it’s clear that he’s hiding not only his dismissal but what he’s intending to achieve with the deals he’s brokering without anyone else’s knowledge.
I guess we’ll hear more from him next week.
You can stream The Afterparty Season 2 Episode 4 exclusively on Apple TV+.
